Kidowed, by Jessica Kenley

Kidowed by Jessica Kenley


What would you do if you outlived your children? How would this affect you? In Kidowed, Jessica Kenley tells how the death of her two children to a rare genetic disease affected her.

Kenley had planned to divorce her husband of two years when she discovers she's pregnant with their son. After Ethan's birth, Kenley learns that her son has epidermolysis bullosa, a disease that affects his skin. According to www.debra.org, approximately 200 children a year are born with e.b.; the disease can range anywhere from mild to extremely severe. Ethan dies from the disease. Not long afterwards, Kenley becomes pregnant with her daughter, Kaylee, who also dies from e.b.

The first half of the book deals mainly with Kayley's life and death, both singly as in comparison to Ethan's life with the disease, while the second half deals with how Kenley copes with the after-effects of her children's deaths.

Jessica Kenley's family and her sense of humor both help her through the dark days of dealing with her children's illness and the after-effects where she tries getting her life back together. Early on, Kenley writes, "I got married. Two years later, right after we had decided to get a divorce, I found out I was pregnant. Whoops." She and her husband, "who we'll refer to as 'Bobo the sperm guy,'" split up the month before Ethan is born. (She also writes that Joy, her therapist, has told her that "anger is my biggest issue. Who knew?") She also gives most people nicknames, rather than their real names, such as Bobo (her ex-), her friend "Nice," and her Aunt "Sweetheart."

When Kaylee dies, half-way through the book, the reader is left to wonder how Kenley can fill another half a book without her children. While she writes how she falls apart on various levels, and how she attempts to cope, Kenley could have drastically shortened the second half of the book. It was almost as though there were two books - before the deaths, and after them. However, there were several places in the second half that I had to scan to keep from putting the book down completely, places where Kenley could have drastically condensed what she was going through in an effort to assuage the pain of her children's deaths.

In the end, though, Kenley writes a sympathetic memoir about the pain of her children's death.

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